Fedora 9 issues running programs

[roachy]

Hi all,

Apologies if this is a total newbie question - I've recently installed Fedora 9 and have a minor issue. When trying to run programs (iwconfig, ifconfig, traceroute etc) from the command line I have to escalate privileges to root and browse to the directory....

For example

root@rclinux02:/sbin# ./iwconfig

rather than just running from whichever directory I am in, as I have done in other distributions. Is this normal? Its a bit of a pain.

Any advice anyone can offer would be appreciated.....searched Google and had no luck....

Many thanks

[daverj]

if you want to run them from whichever directory you are in, you will need to include the directories the programs are in in your path. Currently, it probably looks something like this:

[davidj@afterhours ~]$ echo $PATH
/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/home/davidj/bin

simply modify the PATH line in the .bash_profile file in your home directory to look like this:

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/sbin

The source the file:

source .bash_profile

However, doing this may not be smart. Its not really a good idea to have directories dedicated to root execution in a non-root users path.

davidj

[roachy]

Thanks for the prompt response there...that's helped loads!!

Can I ask for a little further explaination of the security implications - again, sorry to come across like a total newbie, but I'm curious as surely escalated permissions are still required to run programs, even with the amended path.

For example, if I try to change my NIC config using ifconfig, then I get "permission denied" - however if I use sudo then it works peachy.....this is what I was hoping to achieve, so thanks for all the help!

[marcrblevins]

You need to keep root and regular user separate, root priv is to change your rig settings, install programs, etc. Regular user runs off of it, not change squat. Safety measures.